One of the most significant developments in the
modern world -- history may find it to be a decisive one -- has been the
deliberate cultivation of religious extremism by ruling elites trying
to sustain and expand their power.

The rise of virulent extremism in almost every major religion --
Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism -- has many other causes, of
course. Chief among these is the turbulent encounter between modernity
and tradition, a confrontation that has played out -- and is playing out
-- in so many different ways both within and across various cultures.

Modernity encompasses not only the technologies and techniques of
capitalism that in its many guises (including state capitalism) has
plowed up so much ancient ground and overturned so many ancient
certainties, but also the historic development of ideas and ideals
based, ultimately, on the notion of the inherent (even inalienable)
autonomy and worth of the individual. These ideas too have found
expression in myriad -- and often conflicting -- forms. And of course,
there has never been and can never be any kind of clear dividing line
between all of these swirling currents, the multifaceted dimensions of
modernity and tradition; like a jar of colored sands, they mix and meld
in innumerable, unstable combinations as they are sifted and shaken
through the course of time.

So it would be wrong to say that the rise of sectarian zeal can be
ascribed solely to its manipulation by elites. But it would be equally
wrong -- and dangerously blind -- to deny the fact of these
manipulations, or to minimize in any way the pernicious, atrocious
effect they have had -- and are having -- on human existence. They have
placed a deep -- and entirely unnecessary -- shadow over humanity for
generations: a shadow that only gets darker, and more poisonous, as time
goes on.

For the last 50 years, in country after country, ruling elites --
those factions which hold a disproportionate and thus illegitimate sway
over society -- have fostered the growth of religious extremism for two
main reasons: to distract the populace from the way their lives are
unjustly diminished by the elitist agenda -- and to throttle and
demonize any popular movement that might threaten the elite's hegemony.

This happened throughout the Middle East, for example, as tyrants of
every stripe (often clients of the West) turned to hitherto marginal
fundamentalist religious groups to dilute and drive back secular
challenges to their rule. These challenges were often, although not
always, led by movements that could be characterized as "leftist" to one
degree or another. (Although it is also true that any challenge
whatsoever to elite rule is almost always categorized as some kind of
dangerous, revolutionary "leftism," even if it has little or no
socialist content at all -- and even if it is entirely non-violent, or
gradualist, or merely mildly reformist.) Usually with Western help, the
tyrants cultivated religious extremists both as shock troops and
cultural warriors to attack and divide any opposition. As the London Review of Books noted recently (in a
piece highlighted this weekend by As'ad AbuKhalil):

The Islamisation of Egyptian society
deepened after the 1967 war; it became explicit government policy under
Sadat, the self-styled ‘believer president’ who supported radical
Islamists in his battles with the left, and who made the sharia ‘the
principal source’ of law in 1980 – a year before his assassination by an
Islamist. Under Mubarak, praying has become as popular as shopping or
football and now serves a roughly similar function as a distraction from
the innumerable frustrations of Egyptian life. Indeed, Islam as
observed by Egyptians is increasingly an Islam that caters to
consumerist needs. The popular televangelist Amr Khaled mixes Quranic
citations with boosterish advice of a more general kind. This variety of
Islam is no threat to the regime, but it has made life far less
easy-going. ‘My neighbour used to water his plants in his pyjamas on the
balcony, where he’d be joined by his wife in her nightie,’ a friend
tells me. ‘They’d drink beer in the open, and then he’d go downstairs
for the sunset prayers in the local mosque. Today he’d be killed for
this, but at the time he would have seen no contradiction.’

Over the past half century, this same dynamic has played out in various
ways, and to various degrees, in countries all over the world. It has
happened in Iran, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia (Serbia, Bosnia,
Croatia, Kosovo), and many others. It is happening at an astonishingly
accelerated rate today in Israel, which has become by far the most
religiously and ethnically intolerant of any nation considered part of
"the West." And it is most palpably happening on many levels in the
United States, as Chris Hedges and many others have documented.

In most cases, this dynamic involves a strong fusion of religious
extremism with a strident, exclusionary nationalism. Indeed, religious
nationalism is one of the hallmarks of our age. At various times, and in
various quarters, one element -- the religious or the nationalist --
might predominate over the other. We can see this in, say, the Tea Party
movement, where exclusionary nationalism -- the self-defined "Real
Americans" vs. the strange, traitorous Others -- is now in ascendance,
occluding somewhat the sex-obsessed, church-based "Focus on the
Family"-style religious nationalism that was somewhat more prevalent
earlier in the decade. The whole career of Sarah Palin exemplifies this
oscillation, as she has tracked back and forth between the most
virulent, primitive, casting-out-devils Christian fundamentalism and the
bellicose, militarist nationalism she shares with the Beltway neo-cons,
a number of whom are, of course, Jews and/or atheists whom Palin, like George W. Bush, believes will burn in
eternal hellfire.

Although these kinds of contradictions demonstrate the utter
incoherence and moral vacuity of religious nationalism, they rarely
lessen the power of these movements, which -- once unleashed, encouraged
(and heavily funded) -- feed on the nuclear fuel of raw, unexamined
emotions, fears and needs: a fuel that is constantly replenished by the
relentless propagation of artfully filtered (and often fabricated)
outrages and threats.

Here's an example from personal experience. I came of age in the
mid-70s, in the Bible Belt, in a family rooted in that old-time Southern
Baptist religion. This was the era when the TV preachers -- Jim Bakker,
Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and others -- first began
flooding the late-night airwaves. These televangelists, just beginning
the fusion of religion and nationalism noted above, were widely, almost
universally, regarded by the good, God-fearing, church-going grownups of
my acquaintance as extremely marginal, even comical figures, of little
note and little worth.

Yet in just a few years' time, many of these figures, and others
like them, would be trooping to the White House to be courted and
honored; they were commanding vast media networks, college campuses and
commercial empires. One of them, Robertson, even ran for president.
They had become an integral and important part of the nation's power
structure, pushing "hot button" issues, almost always related to sex --
homosexuality, abortion -- and "traditional values" (e.g., submission
to authority: biblical authority, corporate authority, military
authority, male authority, etc.). They constructed a false history of a
paradisiacal past that had been "stolen" from "real" Americans by
liberals, feminists, unions, queers, darkies, commies, college
professors, Mexicans, etc. etc. And all the while, the elite interests
who helped bankroll and magnify these marginal movements into national
juggernauts were in fact beggaring the believers themselves, destroying
their communities -- indeed, their "traditional values," their family
and social networks, and their quality of life -- by gutting their towns
and cities, driving family farmers from their land, sending tens of
millions of jobs to near-slave labor overseas, befouling the
environment, degrading public amenities and vital infrastructure,
relentlessly restricting legal recourse against corporate predation and
depredation, and corrupting the democratic process to send a steady
stream of spineless hacks and whores to Washington to perpetuate the bipartisan
corporate-militarist agenda.

The result has been poisonous rancor, social division, economic
ruin, vast anxiety, endless war and the relentless, systematic
degradation of the quality of life for working people, the poor, the
sick, the vulnerable -- indeed, for everyone outside the small circle of
the elite, and their sycophants and servants in the media-political
class.

And at every step of the way, this ever-growing dynamic of religious
nationalism -- which has found its highest, most complete expression in
the war-profiteering militarist empire of the Terror War and its
attendant atrocities, foreign and domestic -- has been aided and abetted
and strengthened and expanded by the so-called "liberals" and
"progressives" of the Democratic Party (and their own innumerable outriders, servitors and
sycophants) who have been and remain among the fiercest proponents
of ... the war-profiteering militarist empire. ("Progressives," of
course want to "reform" the empire -- that is, make its deadly
operations more efficient and codify its most heinous atrocities into
law -- but none of them, not one, call for it to be dismantled.)

Just as in Mubarak's Egypt or the Shah's Iran, any secular
opposition to the thuggish (indeed criminal) American elites has
been effectively neutralized. The resultant anger and confusion of a
people who are indeed being robbed and screwed over is thus diverted
from its true perpetrators, and instead is channeled into one of few
avenues of "protest" against the "system" allowed to operate freely and
fully on a mass scale: religious nationalism in its various forms. Of
course, this kind of "protest" only strengthens the genuine systems of
rapacious power, and thus, ultimately, serves both sides of the partisan
divide. (Or rather the factional divide between two groups of
squabbling courtiers jockeying for the top perks of the imperial state
they both avidly serve.) And, as we have seen in Iran and will likely
see in Egypt, these movements, once unleashed and empowered, cannot be
completely controlled by their elite patrons (as some Republican
incumbents and insiders have already learned to their sorrow).

On every side, in country after country, and at varying levels, life
is being made "far less easy-going" by the unholy alliance of rapacious
corporate-militarist elites and the Zealotocracy of religious
nationalists they have helped propel to heights of power and influence.
And as long as the imperial system keeps churning its way around the
globe, this murderous, retrograde, life-strangling dynamic will continue
to accelerate.